Long hard road out of hell

Jalopnik Reviews All of our test drives in one convenient place. To an off-road enthusiast, the 2018 Suzuki Jimny seems too good to be true. Tiny body-on-frame design, beefy solid axles, small overhangs, low curb weight, low-range transfer case, rugged looks, reasonable price—on paper, it seems perfect. I just drove the little off-roader and can confirm: It is the real deal. Except on the highway, where it is awful. (Full Disclosure: I wanted to drive the new Jimny so badly, I asked Suzuki’s Germany office if I could. The company directed me to a local journalist from AutoBild, who lent me his press vehicle for a day.) “I swear, before I die, I will own one of these!” I screamed in excitement to my brother as I piloted the Suzuki Jimny over some dirt mounds in a construction site just south of Nürnberg. I had just picked the vehicle up from the home of a German auto journalist, who had kindly led my brother and me through city streets and country roads … [Read more...] about The 2018 Suzuki Jimny Is the Off-Road Bargain of Your Dreams, and the Highway Cruiser of Your Nightmares

Nice Price Or Crack Pipe Is this used car a good deal? You decide! The original MSRP on today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe BMW i3 was over fifty-five thousand dollars. Like all limited range electric cars, the i3’s depreciation is extreme. Let’s see if this one’s current price might make that downward spiral a fun ride at least. When you are close to perfection, it’s hard to imagine ways to improve. I know that’s an issue I face on a daily basis. That’s also an issue confronted by Mazda’s sassy little roadster, the MX5 Miata. Long considered the answer to all that ails you, the question of how to improve upon its near-perfection is one that has long stymied the world’s greatest thinkers. Having solved everything else, it’s rumored even Stephen Hawking was working on that quandary at the time of his death. The obvious answer to the immutable Miata question is of course, to add horsepower. And, as we all know, there’s no … [Read more...] about At $15,500, Could You Get a Charge Out of This 2014 BMW i3 REX?

Unless you were pulled over by one or found yourself stuffed into the back of one, chances are very good that you don’t know what the hell that slab-sided ode to awful is in that picture. In this case, it’s a 1981 Plymouth Gran Fury, an ex-cop machine at that. It’s an R-body Mopar, which means that this Fury, along with the Dodge St. Regis, Chrysler Newport and it’s upscaled New Yorker sibling, is one of two things: the last car to be underpinned by the B-body chassis and one of the biggest flops of Chrysler Corporation in the 1970s. Yes, underneath the blocky body was the same chassis that had appeared in 1962 more or less, and yes, this thing flopped hard. Chrysler had tried to duplicate what GM had done with the downsized 1977 B-body cars, but instead of making them look lighter and nimbler, they made them look like Sherman tanks by comparison. No wonder President Carter slammed Chrysler’s management team as “incompetent”…they were at … [Read more...] about BangShift Question Of The Day: What’s The Worst Idea You’re Glad You Got Talked Out Of?

The 1990s GT1 category was dominated by greats. The Toyota TS020. The Mercedes CLK GTR. The Porsche 911 GT1. But the best cars were actually not these racers. They were the road cars borne out of them. It’s a little unclear, to be perfectly honest, why some of these cars exist. Everyone seems to be in agreement that the rules of GT1 and its immediate predecessor, the BPR Global GT Series, had some sort of homologation requirement in place for their purpose-built race cars. But what gets fuzzy –especially for the manufacturers involved – was not only how many road cars were supposed to be built, but if any were required to be built at all. And under what specification? The Toyota GT-One road car, for instance, was barely a road car at all, and as far as we can tell Toyota only made two. At least 20 Mercedes CLK GTR road cars were built, on the other hand, but in varying specifications. Some had one engine, some had another. Some had a roof, and some, well, … [Read more...] about All The Best Racer-Derived Road Cars To Come Out Of GT1

Selflessly testing the widely-held theory that you can use Stuttgart’s finest as an everyday car, Kyle Fortune tries family life with a 911 Carrera Coupé Our car: Porsche 911 Carrera Coupé List price when new: £76,412 Price as tested: £84,891 Official fuel economy: 34.0mpg (EU Combined) Read more long-term tests March 13th, 2018 Fuel economy this week: 21.5mpg I’m not expecting any sympathy, but the Porsche 911 Carrera has gone. I’ll admit to being more than a little bit distraught when the man from Porsche came to collect it; still, better to have loved and lost and all that… And love it I did, which isn’t unusual for long-term test cars, but there’s usually a lengthy list of provisos attached to that. With the 911 there really wasn’t. I’d asked to borrow it out of a genuine interest to see if a sports car would work as a daily driver. Not just a car for selfish old me, … [Read more...] about Porsche 911 Carrera – long-term test: is a 911 really the best all-rounder?